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Quite simply, Virtual machines suck at emulating Windows Direct3D because they use wine for their emulation. If you actually look into Virtualbox/VMWare, they both use wine's DirectX to OpenGL implementation to emulate Direct3D. That implementation doesn't properly support DirectX 10/11/12 or crucially DirectX 4/5 so old games won't work properly in it, and neither will new games. This is a problem that has plagued both wine and virtual machines for years. Won't be solved until some resources are put into fixing wine's older DirectX implementations.

Frankly I'm not worried, anyone who can scrape together the metals to build a metalicarap will be able to manufacture pretty much anything. I think we'll see a massive reaping of the super rich and a redistribution of wealth amongst everyone once the need for Labor is completely eliminated.

What I suspect will happen is that this technology is so revolutionary that the first country to adopt it and not ban it will see an explosion in material wealth across the entire population. That will cause everyone in other countries to start politically agitating for access to the technology.

So what happens when this appears on the scene?: http://reprap.org/wiki/Metalic...
high quality high detail 3d printing of metals and other materials. Good luck trying to enforce IP rights once this tech hits the market.

So big media is finally going to off itself, or cause an uprising, one way or the other. So either everyone who was pirating and consuming more content will stop, and their sales will plummet. Or the people who can't afford media, due to unemployment/low wages are going to have even less stuff to keep them entertained. Should be fun to watch the crime increase as these people have to leave their homes for entertainment. Personally I think it'll just cause a shift away from film/tv back to gaming. Games last longer, are replayable, and cost less than films.

Basically it's because of the lack of corruption in Europe and the Asian nations that achieved high speed broadband rollouts. The USA is a pretty corrupt place, and it's embedded in the culture from the very bottom of the food chain: Tipping for basic goods and services (where a decent minimum wage should be paid by employers rather than just ripping off customers with tips and surcharges which are still a form of corruption), to the top of the foodchain: Golden parachutes, kick backs, earmarks etc.
In an environment that allows corruption to flourish, and where people expect to get something extra for just doing the job they are paid to do. Of course there is going to be gross program mismanagement and failures. The US has up until now not been completely destroyed by the internal corruption because it's been focused elsewhere, fighting WW1/2, rebuilding the world, fighting communism, stealing other countries resources etc. Now that the wars against communism in South America (1980s) have ended. The corruption has settled on he closest target: The American People. Until the USA deals with the gross corruption within it's own borders (yes that includes the two-party system, minimum wage, drug wars, war on terror (military handouts) golden handshakes etc) They will continue to decline as a nation. At the same time that America has been declining there has been a serious move in most of the world to stamp out corruption. Sure it hasn't been 100% effective, but it's more than the USA has done and it's why we're seeing other countries pull ahead.
Basically when your politics aren't being bogged down with bullshit issues from corrupt people. You get things done. This is why Germany is doing so well, they have strong laws against corruption and they are the manufacturing heart of Europe. Sure countries like Greece and Italy have stuffed up (mainly due to high levels of corruption) But the Nordic/Germanic countries are pulling the whole of Europe with them.

If you think five eyes wouldn't act against a group planning to change the government in the USA/Australia/Britain etc without going through the standard election process you'd be dead wrong. I would even be willing to bet money that they would act against groups calling for new elections trying to force current governments to resign.

So all those servers that are running the internet, and the VoIP servers that require 100% uptime and can be sued for any downtime by large call centres/organisations of people are being stupid by running Linux? Linux meets SLA's, it's idiot engineers who slap systems together without proper testing/maintenance who break SLAs and Windows doesn't save them, it just buys them a bit of time until the excuse that "Microsoft did it" stops buying customer patience.

Quite simply. Nvidia is going to be available as an open source solution via Nouveau with decent performance/stability. Long before ATi will have a stable proprietary or open source driver. Just look at the mesamatrix.net charts. Nvidia cards are ahead of ATi for implementing driver features via Nouveau. Reclocking support keeps getting more patches with every kernel release. It's not too far now until we get at least OpenGL 4.2 supported under open source drivers with decent speed on Nvidia. The closed drivers already do OpenGL 4.5 with great speed. ATi is holding the platform back and causing a lot of bad press for Linux gaming. It's time the community called them out on it.

THIS,
I recently started applying for new jobs not because I wanted to move on, but because I need to get a new bond together and by claiming overtime I can snatch some money back from my current employers. Suffice to say, I can walk into a $20,000 payrise just by showing up to an interview. Let alone having to do anything considered hard. ICT is all about having a specialty and just leveraging it. Also about being smart enough to know when you're getting screwed by your bosses and walking away. I'll be leaving a hastle full environment where I get called on weekends and out of hours to a strictly 9-5 monday to friday job where overtime has generous conditions attached.

I agree with you on the File Save/export function, but not on the rest of the issues with the GIMP. They need a much better pathing tool, but other than that the GIMP is fine. I like to fullscreen the artwork window and set all the toolboxes to on top, and place them aroudn the edges. let's me control the layout better which is nice. The single window paradigm stuff people bitch about just isn't an issue 99% of the time.

I am a programmer, but only because I have been forced to become one. When I was much younger I started working on a game project with a friend with similar goals. However he would not create some of the tools I have asked for. As a result I have been pushed into writing my own 3d modelling software and my own functional equivalent to FRED2 from FreeSpace 2. This is a large reason why open source games have sucked until now. At least in space games there are no tools. If you look at FreeSpace2, it survives because some absolute hero programmers on Windows got together and made tools to edit every aspect of the game, from ship hardpoint editors, to archive extractor/viewers. The original game designers also opened the source code and released the level editor to the game. Without these tools the game would have been abandoned and dead long ago. This is a critical area where Linux/Open Source games are failing. No Tools = No Love. I expect that OpenMW is going to do ridiculously well because of the campaign editing tools they are making. Similarly GTKRadiant on the Quake engine allows anyone to edit Quake/Doom levels. Unfortunately though, they will be the few engines for the forseeable future to solve this problem.

FreeBSD is great, except for all the drivers it lacks which Linux has. There is no substituting the kernel as long as FreeBSD doesn't support things that the Linux kernel does. It's unhelpful to suggest that people just change kernels. Especially when there has been no declaration that Linux itself requries systemd, or ever will require systemd. Right now this is a packaging and distribution issue.